He fills the flower vases, trims the candle bases, takes small change from the poor box.
Tyler has the key.
He takes nail and hammer to tack up the banner of felt scraps glued together reading,
"Jesus Lives In Me."
Alone in the night he mocks the words of the preacher: "God is feeling your every pain."
Repair the Christmas stable, restore the plaster angel.
Her lips begin to crumble and her robes begin to peel.
For Bible study in the church basement, hear children Gospel citing, Matthew 17:15.
Alone in the night he mocks the arms of the preacher raised to the ceiling,
"Tell God your pain."
To him the world's defiled.
In Lot he sees a likeness there;
he swears this Sodom will burn down.
Near Sacred Blood there's a dance hall where Tyler Glen saw a black girl and a white boy kissing shamelessly.
Black hands on white shoulders, white hands on black shoulders, dancing, and you know what's more.
He's God's mad disciple, a righteous title, for the Word he heard he so misunderstood.
Though simple minded, a crippled man, to know this man is to fear this man, to shake when he comes.
Wasn't it God that let Puritans in Salem do what they did to the unfaithful?
Boys at the Jubilee slowly sink into brown bag whiskey drinking and reeling on their feet.
Girls at the Jubilee in low-cut dresses yield to the caresses and the man-handling.
Black hands on white shoulders, white hands on black shoulders, dancing, and you know what's more.
Through the tall blades of grass he heads for the Jubilee with a bucket in his right hand full of rags soaked in gasoline.
He lifts the shingles in the dark and slips the rags there underneath.
He strikes a matchstick on the box side and watches the rags ignite.
He climbs the bell tower of the Sacred Blood to watch the flames rising higher toward the trees.
Sirens wailing now toward the scene.
-- Matthew 17:15 --
-- Lord have mercy on my son
-- for he is a lunatic, and
-- sore vexed: for oftimes he
-- falleth into the fire and
-- oftimes into the water
[ Spoken intro from: Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (byLillian Schlissel) ]
"While the young folks were having their good times
some of the mothers were giving birth to their babies.
Three babies were born in our company that summer.
My cousin, Emily, gave birth to a son in Utah,
forty miles north of the Great Salt Lake one morning.
But the next morning she traveled on
'til noon when a stop was made and another child was born,
this time Susan Mollmeyer.
And gave the baby the name Alice Nevada."
Follow the typical signs, the hand-painted lines, down prairieroads.
Pass the lone church spire.
Pass the talking wire from where to who knows?
There's no way to divide the beauty of the sky from the wildwestern plains.
Where a man could drift, in legendary myth, by roaming overspaces.
The land was free and the price was right.
Dakota on the wall is a white-robed woman, broad yet maidenly.
Such power in her hand as she hails the wagon man's family.
I see Indians that crawl through this mural that recalls ourhistory.
Who were the homestead wives?
Who were the gold rush brides?
Does anybody know?
Do their works survive their yellow fever lives in the pages theywrote?
The land was free, yet it cost their lives.
In miner's lust for gold, a family's house was bought and sold,piece by piece.
A widow staked her claim on a dollar and his name, sopainfully.
In letters mailed back home her Eastern sisters
they would moan as they would read accounts of
madness, childbirth, loneliness and grief.
